Carpentry Worksho

Completed

In 2018, in parallel to the construction of the school (2014-2021), a carpentry workshop was planned, financed and built for the carpenter in charge of the work, Lamine Sambou, with the aim of providing him with the infrastructure to carry out his carpentry work in a professional way, with suitable tools and adequate spaces.

All the structural pieces for CEM Kamanar were made at Lamine Sambou’s carpentry workshop, as well as all the furniture for the school, under the tutelage of Marc Morro, the designer.

The ‘Atelier de Bois’ project, designed by the dawoffice architecture studio, unites the building and plot boundary into one single element, treating the fence directly as a surrounding element for the building. The boundaries of the façade confine both the outside spaces and the interiors, interlacing their limits, and integrating an existing tree into a working patio.

The majority of the construction materials for the building came from the plot itself. The initial excavation became the work site quarry. By transforming the earth of the plot, we managed to reduce materials transportation to a minimum and, thus, the ecological footprint.

This procedure arose from an initial investigation into local aspects that directly influence the project: climate, materials and indigenous construction techniques, among others.

In their indigenous architecture, it is common to use red earth that contains clay in various quantities. This is used to create walls, adding some plant tissue such as straw, to stabilise it, and small stones to provide greater robustness. With this technique, bricks of a similar composition were produced, called CEB (Compressed Earth Blocks). They became the main material of the building, combined to face the different environmental conditions.

The cover, made from local red-wood profiles, and finished with a corrugated sheet, does not fully cover the Façade-Fence with CEB; the space it contains is a covered work area surrounded by a courtyard. In the central part of the rectangle, the programme is organised by a reinforced clay slab finished with a ceramic material enamelled in black and white. It is distributed over a large area for the wood thinning machine, a space with tables for assembling the furniture, and a small office separated by a shelf. The space surrounding the slab is finished with native palm tree bark, draining the areas susceptible to becoming wet during the rainy season.

The structural analysis was carried out by the engineering company CVC Ingenieros.

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